Homeschool weeks 1 and 2: the ones with pizza!

We have had a great first few weeks of being back.  We had pizza week, which we finished. We've had 2 park days with homeschool friends, on Fridays.  We've explored a little bit of our Zoology 2 science, and made it about halfway through the first chapter.  We've played some new and old games.  We have done a nature study. We have done art, and some quilting.  And, we've also received most of the boxes of new curriculum!  (sorry, this will be a little long, with 2 weeks)

Top: Aric holding his rigatoni noodle flag of Italy, one of the fun projects. Middle: left-leaning tower of Pisa, right-Aric's lapbook, and some pages he worked on from the study.  Bottom: left--the inside of Aric's lapbook, right--a pizza fractions game we played.

I'll start out with PIZZA WEEK.  We had a lot of fun with Amanda Bennett's download and go unit study: Pizza party.  If you want a really laid out unit study with lots of interesting things to learn about italy, cooking pizza, people and projects this is really a fun one.

I didn't get pictures of everything.  But here are the things I thought were totally fun, and useful to have shots of.

This is what it looks like in the middle of a "pizza party" unit study day.  We would spread out each boys' lapbook, and new papers for the day, and have the laptop right there to watch any fun videos for the day.

One of the favorite music videos was the song Funicili Funicila...believe me we had this song stuck in our heads for days!  Here you go, you can get it stuck in your head now :)




We explored the science of yeast, and watched it while it "came alive."

Then we made bread...

There were some coloring pages...

We made english muffin pizzas one day for lunch.  This was one of my favorite "projects" because I love cooking with my kids, and I love that they made their own lunch!

Each kid had 2 halves of an english muffin to make and eat...

The sauce...

Eating some of the sauce (seriously, he loved just eating the sauce straight up!)...

Alex was preparing his and mine.  I was nice and let him...

Ready for the oven!... He was so excited to put it in.

Some of the fun pizza books we read.  There are a lot of fun pizza books!

We ended this weekend with a family lunch out to pizza.  We were thinking about trying to get up to an authentic pizzeria (which we may still do someday), but instead decided to keep it simple and go where we know the kids like it, Round table.  It's pretty good pizza.

Alex not wanting to leave because he couldn't get a bouncy ball from the vending machine provided a great opportunity to get a picture!

Art
My favorite subject!  Yet, I don't really have a solid plan for art yet, so we are just doing whatever we find that's interesting or fits in with our current studies.  

Aaron did this fun project from Home Art studio.  It's one of the freebie projects from the website, optical illusion art.  I was considering getting this art program for him, so I had him try one of the lessons out.  He really enjoyed watching the video, and doing this project so much that he did 2!

A few times the boys asked for the draw, write, now books.  I captured them on this day.  They drew quite a few pictures.  It made me happy to see how good and confident they are getting at drawing.

I love that Aric chose the creatures from the ponds, oceans, and rivers because it went right along with our science reading.

A hermit crab!

Aaron's completed pictures.

There's too much more to share in one post, I think I'm going to have to break it up.  I will share about the science, history, play and games in other posts.

Hope you had a good week! 

Desiree